You Don't Say

John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott calls "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and other manifestations of human frailty. Comments welcome. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. Back 2009-2012 at the original site, http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/ and now at www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

This morning, in my office at Loyola University Maryland, I attempted to print from my desktop computer a handout for my editing class.

Though I had done so numerous times this semester, I got an error message. The printer, which is networked did not recognize that I was supposed to be connected to it.

I though for a moment to call the technical support office, but then I noticed that the telephone in the office was not working. Perhaps a coincidence, or perhaps an additional symptom of some network disruption.

I might have sent an email to the technical support office, but that was not possible. The Communication Department is housed in the bowels of a campus building in what used to be a swimming pool. There is no cellphone reception in the offices, which leaves me unable to use the two-factor authentication to sign in to my campus email.

In more than twenty years at Loyola, I have noticed that nearly every technical advance makes it just that much more difficult to get anything done.

I walked to my editing class and wrote the information for my students with chalk, on a chalkboard.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

My great-great-grandfather, John Early, bought the property
outside Elizaville, Kentucky, in 1862. My great-grandfather, Benjamin Given
Early, built the farmhouse circa 1890. It was the home of my grandparents,
Lucien Lundy Early and Clara Rhodes Early, during my childhood. It was in that
farmhouse that my mother, Marian Early McIntyre, the last of the Earlys, felt
her heart begin to fail on November 2, 2001.

My mother left the property to my older sister, Georgia, who
found it increasingly burdensome to manage from her home in Cleveland. In
conversations during recent years I encouraged her to consider selling it.
Otherwise she was going to leave it to me, which I would have found burdensome to manage from Baltimore. And I
entertained no fantasies of retiring there.

This is the year that Georgia sold the property, house and
land, to an Amish family moving to Kentucky from Pennsylvania. Their plan is to
convert the property, which for generations was devoted to growing tobacco and
corn, to an organic dairy operation. I wish them well. It is better for the
land to be worked, and to be worked by people who live on it. It is better for
the house to be lived in than to be allowed to deteriorate. She made the right
decision, a good decision.

But it is still a wrench to sever the link to the land and
the past. There were the fields I roamed and the creek I played in. There was
the house where my grandmother watched her “stories” every afternoon. One of
her favorites, The Brighter Day, had
as its theme the slow movement from the Brahms Double Concerto, and every time
I hear it I am for a moment back in the front room of the farmhouse, reading,
with my grandparents in the next room, the world stable and secure as it was meant
to be.

I effectively left Elizaville when I went off to graduate
school in the fall of 1973, returning since only as a visitor, an expatriate
Kentuckian. Today what remains for me to visit is a row of headstones on a
hillside. Home, a construct of memories and metaphors, hasn't been my home for
years, and now can't be.

On my desk there is a tobacco canister I filled with soil
from the family farm years ago. In a small way, I am a landowner. And if I
should succumb to sentimentality, I may ask my family to mingle that dirt with
my ashes, to reestablish the connection at the end.

Friday, December 8, 2017

Though we took him to a vet for his first shots and were assured of his good health, he developed feline leukemia anyhow and was with us for only two years.

I don't want to be mawkish, but he was a cat with a big personality. A boulevardier, he sauntered along the streets of our neighborhood, paying calls at various houses. And he was affectionate. Every time he returned to grace us with his presence and I picked him up and slung him over my shoulder like a baby, he purred so loudly he could be heard in the next room.

My plan was that after I left the paragraph factory, Mr. Saunders would be the cat of my retirement. As I sat on the porch reading (don't tell Kathleen I was going to be sitting on the porch reading books instead of doing yard work), he would doze companionably on the chair across from me.

But he is gone into the realm of what would have been.

Miss Massie lives with us now, and she is an excellent cat, though perhaps not as enthusiastic for me as her predecessor. It is a good thing to have a cat in the window.

We suffer great griefs, major losses, and learn to bear up. But the little losses, too, leave a pang.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Yesterday I registered disappointment on Facebook and Twitter over a published list of twenty-five supposedly important and essential books that turned out to include Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and The Elements of Style. I looked once at a list of a hundred supposedly important books, only to discover a damned Dan Brown novel.

Lists of important or best or essential books are going to be so arbitrary, idiosyncratic, or boringly conventional that they are a waste of your time. I have a better idea for identifying important books: Tell me which ones you have read more than once.

I'll go first.

As winter approaches, I'm hoping for a snowed-in day, on which I can brew a pot of tea and settle down with Trollope's Barchester Towers, which I re-read with profound satisfaction every ten years or so. (Or perhaps I will pick up Eliot's Middlemarch, which I read forty years ago. I can't stand any of Eliot's other novels, but I loved every word of Middlemarch. And if it is more than one snow day in a row, I may pick up Boswell's Life of Johnson, one of the best books ever written.)

I have read Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an Institution three or four times since discovering as an undergraduate at Michigan State in Roger Meiners's class on the midcentury American poets. It's an academic novel, urbane and epigrammatic.

The other academic novel I've returned to repeatedly is Nabokov's Pnin. Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, splendid as they are, require some work from the reader, but Pnin is pure delight throughout.

All of Barbara Pym's novels, particularly Excellent Women. Very British, quiet and understated, like Jane Austen, and, also like Austen, merciless about her characters without being cruel.

I go back from time to time to John Cheever's collected short stories and Joan Didion's essays.

For the low tastes that every writer and editor should cultivate, since high school I periodically re-read my way through Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe murder mysteries. As I have said before on a number of occasions, at the end of a long day of working with professional journalists, nothing gives greater pleasure than a comfortable chair, a good light, a drink at your elbow, and a book in which disagreeable people meet violent death.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

It's mid-August and nothing much is doing. It's too hot and muggy to be outside. So Sunday would be an excellent day to repair to a comfortable bar for a quiet ale with The Old Editor.

I plan to be at Ryan's Daughter at Belvedere Square on Sunday, approximately 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., for a restorative pint or two (I believe they also serve non-alcoholic beverages) and would welcome conversation with any reader of the blog who should happen by.

Friday, July 14, 2017

As you may have seen in a previous post, we lost Mr. Saunders to feline leukemia in early December and went into a period of mourning. He was a splendid cat, and we had his company for only two years.

As winter wore on, Kathleen found it increasingly bleak to come home to an empty house in the evenings while I was at work. So, though we had thought not to rush into finding another cat, she began researching.

And she found a notice of a rescue cat, a female ginger tabby who had been abandoned at a gas station in Winchester, Virginia, after the death of the woman in whose house she lived.

We applied to the rescue agency, we passed muster, we were granted an interview, and we met Massie.

The young woman who was fostering her named the cat Massanutten for the mountain near Winchestewr, "Massie" for short, and the name stuck. She was very shy with us at the interview, and we wondered whether we would be congenial if we adopted her.

No worries. She is very much a lap cat. She dozes in the afternoons on the cat tree by the window in what was once our son's room. She will scramble up and down the hall for the red dot of the laser pointer, which she understands that we operate. She has quite an odd quirk: When in one's lap, being stroked and purring, she will lash about with her tail and thwack the human repeatedly.

We are, for good or ill, cat people. We knew that no other cat could be to us what the late Mr. Saunders was, but Miss Massie has made a place for herself in our home and in our affections.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Yesterday, after eighty-four days in the neonatal intensive care unit, Julian, having passed all the tests, was released from the hospital and is home with my son and daughter-in-law. He looks grand, and all is well.

Next week I will be in Chicago to assist his fledgling parents in meeting his demands.

It is possible that there may be some stray moments away from bottles and diapers, and if any of who in Chicago who read this blog would like to meet for a coffee, please let me know. It may be possible.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

A son, Julian Early McIntyre, born February 20, 2017, at
Northwestern Hospital in Chicago to Alexandra Aaronson McIntyre and John Paul
Lucien McIntyre. Grandparents are Paula and Scott Aaronson and Kathleen Capcara
and John Early McIntyre, all of Baltimore.

Julian’s delivery—at one pound, fourteen ounces in his
twenty-seventh week—was precipitated by his mother’s preeclampsia. His
fragility led to sentiment within the family to withhold mention of his birth
on social media, lest it tempt Fate.

Now it can be told. He has been thriving in the neonatal
intensive care ward, where he has grown to a staggering five and a half pounds.
The latest tests, performed this week, have all been positive, and he has only
a few more hurdles to surmount before he will be allowed to go home with his
parents.

To those few of you who were permitted to be in the know,
profound gratitude for your good wishes and prayers for my grandson and his
family.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

My mother, Marian Early McIntyre, was born one hundred years
ago today. She came into the world as the United States was about to enter the
First World War and left it seven weeks after the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001.

For twenty-four years she was the postmaster of Elizaville,
Kentucky 41037, a one-room, fourth-class office that was a local nexus. She saw
nearly everyone in town every day and knew what everyone was doing. (To live in
rural Kentucky in those days was to experience a level of surveillance
unmatched by the Soviet Union at the height of its power.)

She had a quick wit and a sharp tongue, the latter of which
I inherited from her, along with a regrettable tendency to indulge it.Her private smile appeared briefly when she was amused, as she
regularly was by slightly improper stories, and my sisters and I called the
glower when she was displeased “the camel look.”

On one occasion she heard that a local official had been
using an official vehicle to ferry voters to the polls on behalf of candidates
he favored, and she told other people. That official got wind of it, came to
the post office, confronted her, and demanded that she disclose whom she had
told. My mother, about five feet tall and slender, looked up at this beefy
figure, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, towering over her and
said, “Everybody I saw. And the ones I didn’t see I called and told.”

After Kathleen, the children, and I moved to Baltimore, we
returned to visit every summer at the farm she had inherited from her parents,
and there were the treats of my childhood: the country ham, the One True Fried
Chicken, and green beans and potatoes cooked on the stove all morning, a
transparent pie from Magee’s Bakery in Maysville. (She also made her powerful
bourbon balls twice a year, in December and February, for Jesus’ birthday and
mine.)

I recently came across a note from her, written on a Post
Office memo sheet on my first day at Michigan State in 1969. It promises to
write every day, encloses a check for laundry money and expenses, and wonders
what I am doing at that moment in the afternoon. Blissfully, youthfully obtuse
and preoccupied with new experiences, I did not recognize then and only now
belatedly realize that she was telling me she missed me.

She did not, after all, write every day, but I have a box
full of letters that I have not yet been able to put on the curb to be
transformed into cardboard. The texts of the letters themselves, innocuous,
quotidian, are not the message. The unstated meaning on every page is how much
she cared for me, how proud she was of me.

After the death of my father, she remained at the family farmhouse.
As her health got shakier, she had a companion in the evenings. But she stayed
on. She had one gentleman friend with whom she enjoyed going out to
restaurants, and I found at her funeral that she had most recently been dating
a man whom she had known in childhood at school. She lived on her own terms to
the end.

Her physical remains rest on a hillside in the Elizaville
Cemetery. You can turn from her grave and see the family farmhouse on another
hill in the distance, one look taking in the place where she spent her entre
life.

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The body is gone, but something of her survives in me.

Marian Early McIntyre with her parents, Lucien Lundy Early and Clara Rhodes Early

You Don't Say

About the Author

John E. McIntyre, a veteran editor and teacher, is back in harness. He worked for nearly 23 years at The Baltimore Sun, for 14 of those years as head of its copy desk, and, after a one-year hiatus, has returned as night content production editor. He has taught copy editing at Loyola of Maryland since 1995. He was the second president of the American Copy Editors Society, serving two terms, and he has been a consultant on writing and editing at publications in the United States and Canada.